“Scandalous Memoir”

Abstract

In April 2013, the US prison colony at Guantánamo Bay returned to the front pages of newspapers, via two prisoners’ highly publicized accounts, each documenting what daily life is like inside the notoriously shadowy detention camp located outside the jurisdiction of US law. Samir Naji al Hasan Moqbel’s op-ed piece “Gitmo Is Killing Me” appeared in the New York Times, and Slate magazine released excerpts from a 466-page handwritten memoir by Guantánamo Bay detainee Mohamedou Ould Slahi.¹ Slahi’s memoir describes his “endless world tour of detention and interrogation” in English, a language he mastered over the course of his imprisonment. He begins by documenting how he was stripped, blindfolded, diapered, and shackled before being flown to Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan for two weeks of torture; he was then renditioned to the US prison camp at Guantánamo Bay, where he and many other inmates were certain that they would not be tortured as they had been in the other prisons because they were now on American soil (“Guantánamo Memoirs”).² Moqbel’s is an entirely different category of self-narrative; as a man enduring an agonizing hunger strike, he gets to the point fast, opening with specifics: “One man here weighs just 77 pounds. Another, 98. Last thing I knew, I weighed 132, but that was a month ago.” Of the over 100 detainees on hunger strike, several were already hospitalized at the time of publication, and dozens more force-fed using inhumane force by poorly trained, hurried medics (Harris).